Marketers are always talking about the customer experience. What about the employee experience? How do you know your workers are engaged?

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It's easy to think that just "showing up" is proof of engagement. But Marketing Smarts Episode 567 guest Joey Coleman asks the tough questions.

"When the employee comes to work, are they giving the best version of themselves?" he says. "When the employee comes to work, do they feel a sense of purpose? Do they have a clear understanding of their role in the organization, the requirements of what they need to do, and most importantly, their responsibilities within the organization and their relationships within the organization? Who fails if they fail?"

Employers have a responsibility to give their workers remarkable experiences, says Joey—where remarkable is "worthy of talking about, worthy of making a remark about."

"If we are going to ask our employees to devote the bulk of their waking hours to us, we have a responsibility to make those hours remarkable," he claims.

Other topics of conversation in this episode include the 4Rs of employee engagement, the eight phases of onboarding, how to get access to what Joey calls the Vault, and more.

Listen to the entire show from the link above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode.

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"Marketing Smarts" theme music composed by Juanito Pascual of Signature Tones.

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Full Transcript: Employee Engagement Strategies for Remarkable Experiences and Effective Onboarding

George B. Thomas: Are you ready to unlock the power of your employees? We're going to be talking about unlocking the power of employee engagement. We're also going to talk about strategies for remarkable experiences and effective onboarding.

Today I'm super excited to have my friend Joey Coleman on the Marketing Smarts Podcast with us. We're going to talk about what keeps Joey up at night when it comes to remarkable experiences, employee engagement, onboarding, and all those things. We're going to break it down to employee engagement, remarkable experiences, what the heck does he mean when we use both of those terms, we're going to talk about success and hurdles, we're going to talk about all sorts of things that you may be able to leverage for your business and your marketing team, and of course, we're going to get some words of wisdom along the way.

Joey Coleman helps companies keep their customers and employees. As an award-winning speaker, he shares his first 100 days methodology for improving customer and employee retention with organizations around the world. Folks like Whirlpool, Volkswagen, Australia, and Zappos. His two books have received critical acclaim and both were instant Wall Street Journal bestsellers. Never Lose a Customer Again shows how to turn any sale into a lifelong customer and his newest book Never Lose an Employee Again details a framework companies around the world can use to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement.

I hope you're ready to take notes. Let's start unlocking, let's start creating remarkable experiences, and let's start thinking about effective onboarding with Joey Coleman. Let's get into the good stuff.

Can you be quadruple excited? I don't know, but I am because today I get to sit down and have a conversation with a good friend of mine for many years, Joey Coleman. We're talking about unlocking the power of employee engagement strategies for remarkable experiences. Let me ask you as we get started, do you need remarkable experiences in your life? Do your clients need remarkable experiences? Do your employees need remarkable experiences? These are the things that I want you to think about as we get started.

Joey, how are you doing?

Joey Coleman: I have to say it is a thrill to be back here. I match your quadruple-level excitement, and I will double that octuple-level excitement for our conversation. I am super thrilled to be here and really appreciate everybody listening in. I know you have rockstar, super smart marketers that listen to this podcast, and just amazing humans in general, so I'm thrilled about our conversation.

George: It's going to be amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're not excited right now, you should just check your pulse. One of the things that I like to do when we get started on these podcast episodes is I like to ask fun questions along the way. The first one, when we're talking about employee engagement, when we're talking about remarkable experiences, when we're talking about effective onboarding and many other things that are in your book, and we'll talk about your book in a minute, what keeps you up at night? Is it a nightmare, is it a dream, what is that thing that keeps you up at night around this topic?

Joey: I love this question. I'll answer that it is a dream in response to a nightmare. Here's the thing. You can't turn on the TV today or open a newspaper or business magazine without reading about the Great Resignation, or quiet quitting, or disengaged employees, or massive layoffs, or conversely, huge difficult finding talent. If you have driven through a fast food joint or quick serve restaurant in the last six months, you have seen a sign saying, "We will pay you a gajillion dollars to come flip burgers." I've seen signs that are $23.50 starting wage, full benefits, vesting on day one of your work.

There is a crisis not only in the United States, but globally, when it comes to the workplace. That crisis is people know now post-COVID that the employers have no clothes. What I mean by that is for many decades, we were operating under this, frankly, fiction that the employers cared as much about us as we cared about them in devoting the time. What we saw during COVID is some were brilliant examples of taking care of their people, but a lot really weren't. Now, the marketplace has spoken, we live in a completely different economy, we live in a completely different planet in terms of connectivity and the freedom people have to navigate between positions.

That's the nightmare. Here's my dream. I know there's a way to fix this problem. The way to fix this problem isn't just Joey's idea. This is backed by scientific research for decades. Research that shows if your employees are engaged, if your employees have gone through a strong onboarding process, if your employees feel a sense of autonomy and a sense of impact with their work, they will not only bring 100% of themselves to the office, but they will be committed to you long term because of the feeling they get.

My hope is to bridge the dream of what's possible, we know it's possible, it's been proven, with the practical reality most employers are dealing with right now, which is a nightmare when it comes to employee experience and employee engagement.

George: So good. On fire already in the first section of the podcast.

Joey: Well, you have a fire going in the background there, George. I saw the fire burning in the fireplace behind you and I'm like we're recording this in the summer, George is hot, I better bring the thunder.

George: We try to keep it nice and cozy here on the Marketing Smarts Podcast, for sure. Folks, if you're like what in the world is Joey talking about, you need to make sure you check out the Marketing Smarts live show, we use clips. Because he referenced the fireplace, I'll make sure for the first time ever to add a clip of me into the show.

Joey, I am going to kick onto my nerdy side for a second. You referenced in that section about the owners have no clothes. Was that a kickback to The Emperor's New Clothes childhood story that you were referencing?

Joey: 100%. This theory that the emperor has no clothes, that the leader has no clothes, when we realize that the person running the organization doesn't have all the answers we thought they had.

Here's the thing, because this statement could very easily be misinterpreted. I'm a fellow business owner. I have employees. I understand the challenges of being a business owner. I've been in business for over 20 years. My wife has been an entrepreneur longer than I have. So, I've been around this world of trying to run a small to medium-size business and understanding the challenges with that.

The issue is this. I think most employers actually care deeply about their people. Their nightmare staying up at night is how am I going to make payroll, how am I going to make sure I don't burnout my people, how am I going to make sure we have enough staff on this project to get the work done, still be profitable, but not totally abuse our folks. I think most employers come to their work from that perspective.

The problem is most employees don't know that. The reason the employees don't know that is two-fold. Number one, they've never been employers. Most people who are employees have never and will never be employers. Most people who are employers, it's been a really long time since they've been an employee. How can I fully connect with what it's like to be an employee when my context, my reference point for that is two plus decades old? I've got to work overtime to do that.

I think the secret is employers need to spend more time showing that they care instead of telling they care. You referenced the Emperor's New Clothes and this type of thing. Here's the thing. Most employers happily tell their employees that they care, but do they show them? Do I have tangible data proof points that you care, physical, digital, emotional proof points that you actually think I matter? Or, as is the case with most employers, your paycheck should be enough to show that I care, I pay you every two weeks? Folks, a paycheck is the ante in chips to sit down at the table, it does not win you the hand, it allows you to play the game.

George: So good. One of the things that I like to do on the Marketing Smarts Podcast is level-set so that everybody understands for the rest of the questions that we ask exactly what we mean, because you could say something, I could say something, but we could mean something totally different. Let's break it down a little bit. Two micro questions that I want to ask you. One is when we say employee engagement, how do you define that as part of the conversation as we move forward?

Joey: This is a great question. Employee engagement can be defined as many different ways as there are employees on the planet. For the purposes of our conversation, let's look at the most recent research from Gallup. This research is less than one week old. This research looked at 60,000 Americans and then they also went global with their study. What they found is that 77% of employees are either not engaged or are actively disengaged. This is quiet quitting in the first bucket and loud quitting in the second bucket, 77% of employees aren't engaged. That's the scale of the problem.

What do I mean by engagement? I mean when the employee comes to work, are they giving the best version of themselves? When the employee comes to work, do they feel a sense of purpose? Do they have a clear understanding of their role in the organization, the requirements of what they need to do, and most importantly, their responsibilities within the organization and their relationships within the organization? Who fails if they fail? One of the things that most employees don't understand is if you drop the ball in the middle of this relay race, it means that three people after you don't get to win and the two people that came before you, their work is for naught.

Employees need to understand the 4Rs; roles, requirements, responsibilities, and relationships. That's what I mean by engagement.

George: I feel like I want to clip that section out and deliver it to employers so that they could ask their employees to watch that segment and grade them on the way that they feel on the things that you just said. Marketing Smarts listeners, rewind that, write down the notes, and realize that Joey just gave you a framework of what you should care about. Well, don't turn it off because we're going to keep going.

Joey, second micro question. When we say remarkable experiences, how do you define this as part of the conversation that we're going to have moving forward around unlocking the power of all of this?

Joey: I think the operative word in this phrase, even though I love the word experience, experience has been bread and butter for my life and my business for 50 years, it's remarkable is the one we have to focus on. Here's the definition of remarkable. That is worthy of talking about, worthy of making a remark about.

Stop and ask yourself this. When your employees go home from work tonight, they walk in the house and they see their spouse, their significant other, their partner, their children, their parents, their roommate, whoever it is, or they're driving home or walking home and calling their loved ones, and they say, "How was work today," are they going to answer with something remarkable or are they going to say, "Living the dream," biting sarcasm, or, "Same silliness, different day," although they're not going to say silliness. This is a family show, so I'm going to do my best. You get the point.

Are you giving your employees things to regularly talk about that are remarkable? Before any employer listening says, "Joey, nice pipedream. We have to run a business here. We have to make money, we have to operate, we have to function," I get it. But if you go to the average employee on your team, the typical employee on your team, any employee on your team, and you say, "When was the last time you felt that something that happened at work was remarkable, and they struggle to remember, we have a lot of work to do.

George: Such a good conversation. This next question, I fully understand it could be the 4Rs, it could be something totally different than the 4Rs. If it is the same, it's a least a good gateway for you to dive further into those 4Rs. What are the key elements that B2B marketers and companies should be paying attention to when focusing on employee engagement and creating remarkable experiences for an effective onboarding process?

Joey: This is a great question that we could spend 20 hours answering, but I'm going to do my best to try to answer it in under two minutes. The reason I wrote the book Never Lose an Employee Again is because most organizations don't focus on every aspect, every phase of the employee journey. I believe there are eight phases that you need to pay attention to.

Phase number one, the assess phase, starts with the job advertisement or the position posting. It starts before the person has even come into your hiring process. That is the first volley of are you creating remarkable experiences. It extends to the final phase, the eighth phase, the advocate phase when you have a loyal raving fan employee who is actively and proactively going on sites like Glassdoor to write reviews of how awesome you are. Anytime you have an open position, they're trying to get the smartest best people they've ever worked with at any company to come apply at your company.

The big thing that most organizations miss is they think of onboarding as one or two days. Onboarding is an employee experience, it lasts the tenure of that employee's time with you. I would actually posit that it goes beyond their time of being an employee, but we can dive into that separately. The reality is that most businesses aren't paying attention to the full journey.

The last thing I'll say, forgive me, George, I love you like a brother, and I understand that so many of our listeners are firmly ensconced in we do B2B marketing, I love you all dearly, but you've become so focused on B2B that you've forgotten the H2H, human-to-human. I get that you sell to businesses, but do you know who is in those businesses? Humans. I get that your people are selling a B2B product, but do you know what your people are? Humans.

What we need to realize is that our focus on the transactional is creating opportunities to miss the transformational. Our focus on recurring revenue is missing the opportunity to create relationships and an ROI that is based on how I feel when I interact with my coworkers, my colleagues, and my clients, as opposed to how many sales I got this week.

George: I love it. First of all, I am a huge advocate that it's always about the humans. If that is your starting point, you will end up in the winner's circle at the end of the day. I could go so much further, but that's not why we're here.

I want you to do this for me. I love the show Mythbusters, I could watch that over and over again. If there's a marathon on, my wife knows just let me go shopping, spend all his money, he'll never know, he's watching Mythbusters. With today's topic, what is a common myth? It could be around engagement, employees, experiences, being remarkable, onboarding. Whatever it is, what would you be like this myth I hate and I want to debunk it right now on the Marketing Smarts Podcast?

Joey: I feel like I need a season, not an episode of Mythbusters. I'd need a season to talk about all of them. So many choices to pick from. Okay. Here's a myth that drives me insane. Most organizations think that somewhere between day eight and day thirty on the job that you should be all good, you should be up and running, you should understand how things are going, you should be producing, you should be able to function on your own.

That is not true at all. The person who thinks that, you didn't apply that same standard to your onboarding, growth and development and skillset acquisition. Yet you're applying that fictional ROI metric to the people that are joining your team. How long does it take you to feel comfortable in an entirely new situation? Some of the most resilient, most adaptive, most flexible humans I know don't truly feel comfortable until they're in month three, four, six, or twelve.

I used to practice law, I'm a recovering attorney. The first step is admitting you have a problem, there's 11 steps after that. Here's the thing. Five years into being a trial attorney, I finally felt like I was starting to understand a little bit about it how worked, five years later. I'm 50 years old. 20 years of running my own business, and I can list out the topics that I know I need to learn more about, and it's much longer than the list of topics that I think I've figured out. Your employees are the same way.

Onboarding is not measured by days on the calendar. It is measured by intentionality over the tenure of the relationship. What are you doing to continue to invite that person into the fold, to engage them, to get them enmeshed within your brand spirit, your offerings? Are you bringing in decision-makers or are you bringing in rule-followers?

So many companies think that the secret is go hire rule-followers. I'm sorry, friends. In 2023, if you are hiring rule-followers, great, you are approaching your business from an industrial revolution mindset that is beautiful if you're making widgets, running a factory, and competing on quantities and efficiencies. In this day and age, that's not what you're competing on. Hate to break it to you, you're not. The race on price is a race to the bottom. The race on quality is over. We expect high quality. If we're not getting high quality, why are we even having this conversation?

The race is built around experience. Are the interactions you're creating remarkable? If you want your people to create remarkable experiences for your customers, they better know what one is. The way they're going to know what one is, is by how they feel treated by you, their employer.

George: So good. I agree with you. There's probably so many days, months, years that we could have around this topic. I want to give you a chance before we continue back down the road of the questions that I want to ask you today, I want you to talk about the book. You've referenced it once, I think. Talk about the book, give the name, where people can find it, but more importantly, I want you to let us know who is it for, what they'll get out of it, and end with what is your, Joey Coleman's big hope that when people read the book, it ends up in XYZ.

Joey: I love it. The book is called Never Lose an Employee Again. One of the things that was really important to me when the book came out is that it was available in all the formats that people like to consume books. If you like to hold a book in your hand and read a hardcover and take notes in the margins, you're good to go. If you like to see it on your Kindle, or Nook, or e-reader and highlight things as you go, you're good to go. If you like the sound of my voice in this conversation and you like listening to audiobooks, you're good to go because I narrate the book. It's available in any format.

This book is a collection of over 50 cases studies from all seven continents. That was really important to me. It was really important to me to come back to that humans are humans conversation because this stuff works globally. In a remote environment where we have people, in one of the case studies they have 30+ employees across 17 time zones globally. If they can make employee engagement and employee retention work, you all have no excuse. That's a company with 30 people. These aren't just case studies from companies that have 100,000 employees and HR budgets in the billions. I'm talking about small businesses.

The smallest company in the book has one employee. Wait a second. One? What am I going to learn from one? Here's the thing. If you have one employee, and you're about to hire your second employee, you have a chance of ruining 50% of your organization in a single hire. If you have 1,000 employees and you hire a bad apple, the mechanism can probably withstand that hit. If you have two employees, three employees, five employees, you're in trouble.

Who is this book for? This book is for two categories of people. Number one, leaders that recognize that in this competitive market they could be doing better, they could be finding better talent, they could be keeping their talent. They've felt the pain of the Great Resignation or of quiet quitting, or they're smart enough to know that if they haven't felt it yet, the freight train is coming for them. Category number two is people who lead others, middle managers, department heads.

Guess what? When we talk about employee experience, there are eight phases that I outline in the book. The fourth phase, the middle of the journey, is your first day on the job. Some people are shocked there are three phases that happen before you even show up at work. Yes. If you're not paying attention to those, day one you're already in the hole. More importantly, the phases that come after that first day on the job, the four subsequent phases, who is responsible for that? Day one, usually the responsibility falls on your head of HR. What about day two, day five, day seven, day 30, day 45? This falls on their direct manager.

If you're in the organization saying, "I'm not on HR," are you partially incentivized on the performance of your team? Do you get raises or promotion based on how your department or group functions? If so, this book is for you. You can jump right in at the acclimate phase, if you want to skip the first chapters. I'd love for you to read the first chapters, but if you want to skip right into phase five, the acclimate phase, and start there because that's when the employee becomes your responsibility, and I want you to succeed going forward.

What's my big dream? My big dream is that people read this book and they take action. Here's what I mean by that. I believe there are three types of speakers and writers. George, you and I have talked about this before. There are folks that want you to think differently. There are folks that help you to feel differently. There are folks that, if you're really lucky, compel you to act differently. While I certainly want my audiences and my readers to think and feel differently, if they don't act differently, I haven't earned their investment.

Not only their $30 investment to buy the book, that's chump change in comparison to the hours they're going to spend reading the book and thinking about how they're going to enhance their experience, answering the questions that I have in the book, and downloading the worksheets, the checklists, and the tools that I've made available so that you can actually take this into your organization, broadly if you're in the HR department or individually if you just run a tiny team. If you have a tiny team, shake it up, do stuff differently within your operation, blow the doors off, draw attention to your team that way because your people stayed, they're engaged, they're focused, they're productive, they're kicking tail and taking names. They're not even taking names, they don't have enough time, they're just taking initials because they're doing so much.

If they act, I feel like I've won.

George: I have to keep digging deeper. In that last little piece, you said the word tools. Now I have to ask are there any tips, tricks, templates, hacks that the marketers, the companies, the humans can use when implementing this employee engagement, remarkable experiences, onboarding eight step 4Rs process? Where should they head, what can they get in their hands to actually do this in a better way?

Joey: A couple of things. Number one, when I was putting this book together and I'm talking to all of these amazing remarkable companies around the world, I realized that one book is not enough space. There are limitations, especially when you have a traditional publisher and they're like, "300 pages is about the max, nobody is going to sit and read 10,000 pages." But there were so many good stories and tools. So, here's what I did. I created something I've never done before called The Vault.

The Vault is where we keep ideas that matter. The Vault is where we keep valuables. The Vault is where we keep the things that will really move the dial. If you read the book, you get free access to The Vault. That's not a paid thing. You just sign up and you go to The Vault. In The Vault are videos, checklists, and templates.

One of the things we put together in The Vault, and it brings us back to the 4Rs that we talked about earlier, the requirements, the roles, the responsibilities, and the relationships. There's actually a little mini-survey in there that you can print out physically, hand to your team, and say, "Score yourself on this," and get an actual feedback in real time about whether you are delivering on the 4Rs. It's kind of like the 3Rs growing up, reading, writing, and arithmetic. These are the 4Rs of business. Are you delivering on those things?

There are videos in the tools, there are checklists, there are additional case studies that we couldn't fit in the book. I made myself a promise when I wrote the book, I would only tell one story per company. Here's something everybody listening knows. If you find an amazing company, they're good at more than one thing. Of course they are. They wouldn't be amazing and remarkable if they weren't. But I couldn't put all of it in the book, so you get the story behind the story.

My goal is for this book to be evergreen. This is not a book you read once. This is a book you read, you put it on your shelf, and you read it again in a year. Some of my most loyal readers from my first book Never Lose a Customer Again have shared with me that they've read the book five and six times, they read it every year. When we read a book, we're reading it from the perspective of our reality at that moment, the economy, our experience, our team, what we're dealing with. When we read it a year later, different things stand out. So, this is written to be evergreen and timeless so that it continues to be a resource to you going forward.

George: I want to go off the beaten path for a second. You mentioned a while back employee experience, and you used words like tenure of the relationship. Way back a while ago, you said time after they are no longer employees. I have to have you unpack that portion of the conversation because I just don't know if anybody is thinking about that.

Joey: Most businesses aren't. Most businesses, when an employee comes in and says, "I'm here to give you my two weeks' notice," what it brings up in us as the person who has been told this is, "You disloyal betrayer. How dare you. All the time and effort I've invested in you. You're leaving?" or we think, "Oh my god, if this person leaves, we're going to collapse. This person is a lynchpin in our organization. Can I give you more money? Can I give you more benefits? Can I act like I care now because I wasn't caring before you walked in the door?" That's usually what happens.

There's a company called McKinsey & Company, which anybody who has been paying attention to the high level of business strategy globally over the last 50 years has probably heard of. They have over 30,000 employees worldwide. One of the things that McKinsey talks about during the interview, before you've even gotten a job offer, is the McKinsey alumni network.

What McKinsey talks about in all of their marketing materials, anytime their managing partner is doing an interview or a podcast, they'll say something to the effect of, "We're really excited that there's a lot of McKinsey in a lot of other companies in the world," because McKinsey employees go, they get connected, they learn a boatload of stuff, and then they go head companies. Little companies that you might have heard of like Facebook and Citi, and these amazing global organizations all over the world that their senior leadership team is staffed by former McKinsey consultants.

Two powerful things happen. Number one, where do you think McKinsey gets its clients from? That would be their alumni that are referring people in. If you're in B2B marketing, if somebody on your team goes in-house at one of your big clients, you might be going, "They poached them from us." No. You just got an internal advocate who if you've done a good job treating them well while they were on your team, now you have a salesperson that's on their payroll. This is a no-brainer.

Number two, they focus on maintaining that network. They have said that anybody who is in the network can call on the network for help. If you're facing a problem, you can call a colleague who has dealt with it before. You can call someone on the other side of the world. You're expanding into Dubai? Guess what? There's 38 former McKinsey alumni operating on the ground in Dubai, you can go there and you have a network built in immediately.

The smartest organization in the world recognize that offboarding an employee is just as important as onboarding. If you have any appreciable amount of an onboarding strategy, I would ask you do you have that same volume of strategy, intentionality, and touchpoints in your offboarding protocol? My gut instinct is you don't, and it's an opportunity for an improvement.

George: So powerful. By the way, Marketing Smarts listeners, I hope you heard these words, if you treated them while they were there. That's when you have an internal advocate. Only then, by the way, does that become a viable lead generation strategy.

Joey, I want to give you the opportunity to maybe share another success story or two. I'm just going to ask, for the topic that we're covering today, what does success look like, how do we reach that point of nirvana in everything that we're trying to do around employees, experience, onboarding and offboarding, and being human? What does success look like?

Joey: For me, I think success needs to be defined by every individual, by every leader, by every organization. You have to have a clear understanding of what your definition of success is. Let's be candid. In this social media era, it's real easy to get sucked into someone else's success story. It's real easy to look on social media and see somebody vacationing in the Maldives and say that's success, or see somebody driving a Maybach and say that's success, or see somebody walking down the steps of a private jet, which by the way they rented for the photo shoot, but that's beside the point, and think flying private, that's success.

Success is how you define it. In the employer context, here's how I define success within my organization. I want my employees while they're with me to say, "This is the best place I've ever worked. I'm challenged, I'm supported, I'm encouraged, I'm listened to, I'm valued, and I have unexpected moments of surprise and delight in the experience that keep me coming back for more." I also want them to, when their time with me is done, to say, "One of the coolest places I ever worked was for Joey Coleman." If I've done that, I've actually made an impact on their life.

Most of us get into business, most entrepreneurs, most leaders get into business because we have an idea of how we're going to improve the marketplace. Our widget is going to be better. Our service is going to deliver more value. We sell that, we market it, we share that. That's great and it's important, but I know very few people who on their deathbed who say, "Gosh, one of the things I valued the most in this life was that widget I bought from that company 15 years ago," or, "One of the best things I ever had was that service contract that I signed up for an additional 12% of the overall fee to make sure I didn't have to worry about maintenance." They talk about the people.

If we are going to ask our employees to devote the bulk of their waking hours to us, we have a responsibility to make those hours remarkable.

George: Again, Marketing Smarts listeners, I hope you hit the rewind button because Joey started to list off things. If you were to take those things and turn them into questions, more specifically questions of am I doing this or enabling this at my organization, you will have yet another framework that I think will help you be almost more self-aware of how you are actually impacting your organization as a leader.

Joey, this has been a fantastic episode. I'm going to ask one last question. Honestly, the entire time I've been excited to get to this question just because of who you are. We go through life, we have these journeys, and along the way we pick up nuggets of wisdom. The last question that I always ask on the Marketing Smarts Podcast is, what words of wisdom would you want to leave the listeners today?

Joey: I've been so fortunate to have so many mentors, so many leaders, so many role models, people that I've learned from, people that I've watched, people I've tried to emulate. It's an incredibly difficult question. What comes to mind is a variation on a theme of an answer that I imagine is an answer that wouldn't necessarily come up when asked about words of wisdom.

I'll tell a little story about my mom. My mom is an amazing woman. She grew up an Air Force brat, lived all over the world, never lived in any one place for more than about two years. Then she got married to my dad and proceeded to raise seven children. Yes, you heard that, seven children. She's a saint.

One of the things my mom has said for years, decades now, is if we knew the power of our words, we wouldn't speak.

I get paid to talk for a living, that's what I do, I'm a professional speaker. The words you say to your people, your teammates, your colleagues, your coworkers, your employees, your managers, your boss, your spouse, your significant other, your friends, your children, your parents, your siblings, the words matter. Be intentional with your words. Be specific with your words. Be careful with your words.

When your words come out in a way that you didn't intend, which welcome to being human, this happens to all of us, have the courage and the commitment to the people in your life to go to them and say, "That's not at all what I meant to say. That's not at all how I meant to say it. I apologize. I hope you'll forgive me. What I was trying to say was this," and then speak from your heart.

One of the things that both drives me crazy and gives me great hope in the world of B2B marketing is how little attention is paid to the words. We think about what words are going to help us convert, what words are going to help us sell more, instead of what words are truth. I don't know about you, but when somebody speaks truth, the world kind of goes quiet for a second, everything stops, it hits us in a different way. We don't just feel it in our ears, we feel it in our heart, we feel it in our gut. That can be about a personal topic or it can be a professional topic, it doesn't matter, truth is truth.

If we knew the power of our words, we wouldn't speak. But if you are going to speak, make sure you're choosing your words wisely.

George: Marketing Smarts listeners, did you take lots of notes? I have to ask, what is your one thing, your number one execution opportunity after this podcast episode? Make sure you reach out and let us know in my inbox or on Twitter using the hashtag #MPB2B.

I also have to ask are you a free member of the MarketingProfs community yet? If not, head over to Mprofs.com/mptoday. You won't regret the additional B2B marketing education that you'll be adding to your life.

We'd like it if you could leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, but we'd love it if you would share this episode with a coworker or friend. Until we meet in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast where we talk with Jason Harris about decoding effective communication, understanding the essence of impactful connection, I hope you do just a couple of things. One, reach out and let us know what conversation you'd like to listen in on next. Two, focus on getting 1% better at your craft each and every day. Finally, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble B2B marketing human. We'll see you in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast.

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Published on October 12, 2023